


Backwards Compatibility

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Alteration, Pining, Robots, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:15:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25712680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: This is what Revenant has been waiting for. This is why, against all sense, he had allowed a thin layer of grime to accumulate on himself, why he had allowed himself to become dusty, though the grit made his non-skin crawl.The pretense of weakness, to lure the target in closer. He cannot remember if he has ever been sent on this sort of mission before, but the satisfaction he feels when the hacker comes over to him is enough that he feels a warm rush through his body. Everything in him, tense and primed for action.
Relationships: Crypto/Mirage (mentioned), Crypto/Revenant
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday present for my friend el_desenladrillador. I hope you like it!

He remembers things, sometimes.

He remembers waking up in bed beside a beautiful man with chestnut-colored hair and freckles. His name has been lost to time, and the city skyline is no longer familiar, but he remembers him.  
His eyes had been honey-brown. His smile.   
Revenant wonders who he was. How long ago he lived. If he had ever lived, or if he was some leftover scrap of programming that the engineers had missed, some uncompiled blip of data left over from one of the wipes. 

He remembers other things, more often.

He remembers looking in a mirror and seeing a handsome blond man—lithe and muscular, with eyes the color blue of skyscraper glass.  
He remembers thinking—knowing--he looked good in red. 

The memories only extend back to certain point. He understands childhood and adolescence as obscure concepts. He wonders if he ever had one, if he ever really had a life. He wonders what his name was. He wonders what his skin used to feel like, if his arm hairs were the same blond as his head hair, or if, like some humans, it was darker. Redder. One of the marks he'd killed had been a blond man with a red beard, and red arm hair. He remembered the way the man's hands had closed around his arm, feeble grip growing weaker as he suffocated him one-handed. The Hammond man with the huge, obvious augmented arm had had brown hair on his head and blond hair on his arms. 

He looks down at his hands now—at the shapes of his hands, the red fiber-alloy of the body.  
He wonders if red was ever his favorite color, or if that was one more thing they programmed into him. He has no way to tell.   
Time is a strange thing, when you have no organic limitations or ties to it.   
The memories he has are not in any kind of order. He wonders again if that is how a mind functions, or if that is merely how his has been reprogrammed to function.   
He wonders how many times he has been reprogrammed. How many times he has been pushed to 'function'. 

Then there is a soft click and the light comes on, and the augmented human comes in, smelling like warm skin flesh-warmed metal, delicious and faintly forbidden.   
He feels the sense-memory of saliva flooding into a mouth he doesn't have, and has to quash the desire to bite a tongue he does not have, either. He wonders if he ever did.

The hacker—because that is what this augmented human is—settles a damp towel around his neck and regards him from the doorway. He is wearing only a pair of loose gray sweatpants, and has even changed the skin covering many of his augments, or else they are the expensive kind that can be changed at the user's will. Revenant has an obscure snip of knowledge that such things are state-of-the-art and bleeding-edge, but is uncertain how old the thought is. 

He does not smell of fear, but the musk of sex still clings to him faintly, and even though the walls are reinforced with sound dampeners, his own auditory sensors are powerful enough that he could hear the hacker and the idiot hologrammer exerting themselves in the room down the hall.

Finally the hacker speaks. “You already know that I saw you come in.”  
“Yes.”   
“Then why didn't you say anything?”  
This question requires some consideration to answer. Humans tend to be terrified, when it is revealed at how thin and flimsy their veneer of safety and security is. And for most of them, it is.   
This one, though, he has yet to get the jump on. The surprise at always being anticipated was novel, at first. Pleasant, although he could not have explained why.  
This time, when he'd broken in, there had been a blanket folded on top of one of the metal storage crates. Instead of standing in the corner as he'd done the first time he'd broken in, he had taken the hint and seated himself.   
The pleasantry feels redundant, but the gesture is not unappreciated. It was strangely kind, that the hacker is still going through the pretense that he is human.  
That he would pretend he is a person. 

He could not, after all, know that Revenant feels fatigue. Why would anyone think a machine could become tired?  
The thoughts slide back and forth in his mind, sometimes with him peeling back visual layers to look into the code of them, opening and closing their tags even as he thinks the thoughts. The multiple layers of consciousness used to give him a vague feeling of vertigo—not that he could ever have done anything with the sensation. A lack of a stomach or throat gives him a distinct disability to vomit.   
He pushes through it. Maybe he always has. 

There will be something that will wash away the sick feeling, in a moment. If he is patient enough. 

Finally, he answers, “You sounded busy. Have you and your idiot exchanged enough fluids to give you the endorphin rush you wanted?”  
The hacker makes an irritated noise, but he is smiling. He shakes his head. “He's not an idiot. He just has the sense to act like one.”then he pauses. “Am I making a mistake, telling you that?”  
A sarcastic response is on the tip of Revenant's tongue—his non-existent, missed tongue—but he only cocks his head. 

He says, carefully, “No. it wouldn't serve any purpose, to harm either of you.”  
The hacker knows this. The hacker probably knew he'd be able to break into this place. The thought that he'd chosen it anyway makes Revenant feel...something. 

The hacker does not ask why he is there.   
He has a tiny drive, with some information on it, which the hacker might want. A brief idea of simply giving it to him dances through his mind, but then this complicated dance, this ritual they have built up, would be over. And he is loath to admit it, but he enjoys this. The dance they have been doing, ever since the hacker and the hologrammer sneaked him out of the Arena.

They are beyond the stage of bared teeth and empty threats; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they never reached it. 

He sits. He waits.  
He wants.

The hacker regards him calmly for another moment, and then comes over.  
Revenant has to fight down the eager twitch, the desire to stand up and loom over the other man. He wants to touch him. The desire is jarring, alarmingly, pointlessly human. He wants to rest the points of his fingers on the join in the hacker's jaw, where the synthetic flesh meets the organic-- behind his ears, where he probably has hidden sub-dermal ports. How unlikely, how strikingly beautiful a joining of flesh and machine.

That is not how this goes. He knows this.  
So he waits, hands on his knees, until the hacker comes closer. 

“You're filthy,” the hacker says, quietly, softly. “If you get any more grime on you, it's going to start to affect your performance.” then, “Isn't that uncomfortable?”

This is what Revenant has been waiting for. This is why, against all sense, he had allowed a thin layer of grime to accumulate on himself, why he had allowed himself to become dusty, though the grit made his non-skin crawl.   
The pretense of weakness, to lure the target in closer. He cannot remember if he has ever been sent on this sort of mission before, but the satisfaction he feels when the hacker comes over to him is enough that he feels a warm rush through his body. Everything in him, tense and primed for action. 

“I'm not damaged,” he says, slowly. As if that was the answer to the question.  
But the hacker goes to another of the crates and takes out a small kit, familiar by now, which he sets on the crate he is sitting on, beside Revenant's thigh. It is about the size of a man's travel toiletry kit, and he already knows what it contains. Just seeing it floods him with a fresh wash of...something. 

The first time he'd seen the kit, he had been terrified.   
For the first time in a very, very long time, he'd had the novel experience of real fear.


	2. Chapter 2

Tae Joon ducked into the abandoned building, slid the door shut, and knelt out of sight of the window.  
The fight was going to be a toss-up; with one of his drones shot down and separated from his team by a particularly determined bunch of enemies, he'd had to run and hide and hope he could find better weapons.  
The place appeared to have been some sort of dormitory, likely for the miners, before the world was abandoned and then subsequently purchased and repurposed as an Arena.   
His lip twisted. The bastards hadn't even bothered to clear out the last peoples' gear, and their name-tags were still on their lockers.  
A quick search turned up a rifle, for which he had no ammo, and mercifully some more bullets for the pistol that he did have. 

And while the others were rushing around fighting, he had time to do what he was actually there for.

The computers at the place were all ancient, some of them older even than he was. He wondered how long the mining operation had been abandoned by its previous owners.  
He did not have time to complete the thought.  
Later he would remember that the only warning he had was a soft metallic clinking from overhead—and then something huge swung down, blocking him from the doorway.

He leapt backwards, his back hitting rungs on a bunk ladder.   
There was a figure, in age-faded crimson, with a white skull-like mask. And then he saw the thin limbs, the not-shape of the knees, and finally the burning yellow eyes, and realized what—WHO--he was looking at.

They regarded each other silently, neither moving.  
Then Tae Joon climbed to his feet, and the figure, still glaring at him with its unblinking yellow lamp-eyes, began to pace in front of him.   
He moved as if he was tired, his strides slow and purposeful, long thin arms loose at his sides. He'd slung several packs across his chest, all mismatched, clearly taken from fallen Legends. Tae Joon wondered if they were from his victims—grisly trophies, like a serial killer—or if they were just battle spoils, taken for survival. 

“You're the hacker, Tae Joon Park,” the...thing said, its voice a low, warped growl—less an approximation of a human voice than the ruined remains of one. “You...are not supposed to be here either. I'll keep you...alive. You could be...useful to me.”  
“What do you want?”   
The simulacrum moved with a kind of mesmerizing, terrifying mechanical grace, and Tae Joon had enough time to realize he still had ammunition in the pistol. If this got ugly...

But the robot was talking again. “I want...information. About the Syndicate. About Hammond Robotics. And I want off. Out.”  
“Out of the arena? Or off-world?” he asked.  
He blinked rapidly three times, which brought up a menu in his left ocular HUD, implanted in his eye and much more discreet than his combat drone HUD; no one merely looking at him would be able to see what he was doing. 

“Both,” the robot said.   
Tae Joon's last drone was in view. He knew that Mirage would be nearby, would be on them in moments.   
The sound of nearby gunshots made him tense up. Still, mind racing, he remembered something he'd overheard Elliot talking with Makoa about—something he'd thought was nothing but an urban legend, or a lie about the Arena meant to scare green competitors. Tales of a violent, murderous simulacrum running amok, killing indiscriminately whenever it encountered someone. His intel had told him that the simulacrum was real, but there had been so few sightings that he'd doubted he'd ever actually see him.   
“All right,” Tae Joon said. Mirage wasn't close enough to help with this. Not yet. He had to buy himself time.   
The simulacrum made an ugly gurgle of sound. “That's it? Not going to do what you skinbags usually do and ask what's in it for you?”  
and Tae Joon did something he didn't think he'd ever do, if he was staring death in the face.  
He smirked. “You're gonna let me live, aren't you?”

Then heavy footfalls, a door opening.   
Everything afterwards happened very, very fast.   
Mirage, and Mirage, and Mirage were there, and the simulacrum grabbed one by the throat with a disgusted noise, only for it to explode into hard-light shards. The real Mirage got two shots off, and the simulacrum jerked and made a garbled grunt as if in pain, but by then Tae Joon had had time to activate his EMP. If he'd boosted it in such a way that would have disqualified him in the actual games, what did it matter?

The silence afterwards was absolutely thunderous.   
Then, “Aww, dude, come on! You even took out the lights!”  
“Unless you're hurt, be quiet!” he hissed.   
The simulacrum had simply fallen over backwards when the EMP had gone through.  
“No one saw me or nothin'. Don't worry. Think I saw those cute Wattson and Lifeline chicks drop somewhere on the other side of the map. Their third was Pathfinder, but I knocked him out over by a relay tower. Think we can take the two of 'em?”  
“Not yet,” Tae Joon said. 

Tae Joon grabbed one of his kits and hastily pulled some things out of it, rushing over to the downed simulacrum and kneeling near him. He activated his HUD and a soft, pale blue glow spread over everything.   
“What the fuck,” Elliot said, “Is that—is that that THING? The—the murder robot? Holy SHIT, it's REAL? I thought that was just some bullshit the drop-ship pilots tell us Legends to keep us on our toes!”  
“Yes, he's real,” Tae Joon muttered, “And we're taking him with us.”  
“Uh, buddy, I don't know if you saw the news, but he kind of impaled that guy Hammond was sponsoring, and splattered his arterial blood all over that reporter chick. I don't think--”  
“We're taking him with us. He has intel we could use. Help me move him.”  
But he was too heavy to budge at all. In the end, they'd secured the perimeter instead, and Tae Joon had pulled aside the red scarf and hastily cleaned debris out of the ports on his neck, only to realize that they weren't compatible with any of the connectors or cables he had. Either the simulacrum was a custom job, or was too old to be compatible with any of his tech.  
Which meant that, if he wanted any information from him, he'd have to ask the old-fashioned way.


	3. Chapter 3

Revenant remembers this very clearly—being conscious but unable to move, most of the body's functions knocked offline by the EMP. In some perverse mercy, however, his neurological functions remained on. Or awake. Whichever.  
Maybe that meant he still had an organic brain.   
He remembers the man's hands, gentle and careful on his neck, even as he was rushing. He remembers the feeling of helpless rage at not being able to move, followed by smugness, even though on its tail there was a kind of despair. He'd had the same thought, too, and had once tried to jack himself directly into a computer terminal and realized that none of the ports matched any cables he could find. He'd had to do everything wirelessly. 

He'd been able to hear them discussing what to do with him. Talk of smuggling him off-world. The two of them had finally managed to drag him to an empty gun crate and heaved him in.  
He remembers the hacker leaning over him, his face less than an arm's length away from his own. “I'm sorry. If you get back up before we are back, come and find us. If you are who I think you are, we need to talk.”   
He'd snapped a green band around one of Revenant's wrists, and there was a soft, mechanical sound. Revenant felt as much as he heard the hard-light illusion engage itself—a sensation of static electricity crawling over his inert frame.  
He remembers feeling another spike of rage. What was humans' obsession with changing the way things LOOKED, as if it could change what they really WERE? 

The hacker is wiping off his hands.  
“Do you want me to help you get some of that off your face?” he asks.   
Revenant huffs. He turns his head slightly to the left, but his eyes track the hacker's face, eagerness disguised as distrust.   
He said 'face' instead of 'faceplate'. The thought makes an ugly, strange, broken joy well up inside him. He does not know if he is supposed to have these feelings at all.   
One day, if he can keep the hacker interested in him for long enough, he will find whoever at Hammond is responsible. And one day, he will make them explain everything to him.  
One day, he will make them pay.

But that day is not today.   
Today, the hacker is looking at him, studying him, not with fear or distrust, but with interest.   
As if he cannot wait to get his hands on him, either, but he is both too polite and too cautious to outright ask.   
Revenant mutters, “You humans, so fond of your petty illusions. Even verbal ones. Does it make it easier to call it a 'face' than a 'faceplate'?”  
“I was just trying to be polite. I'll call it a table, if you want me to.” the hacker says easily.   
Ruthlessly blunt and pragmatic. Revenant marvels at it. There is no artifice, no falsity. The hacker regards him calmly, waiting.

Aloud, he grunts again. The sound is ugly even to himself. “Yes. The dirt. You are...decent with technology, and cleaning is simple.”  
It is the hacker's turn to snort, but he does not take the bait and respond to the insult beyond that. “There's nothing simple about this. Your body is a more advanced piece of technology than most people ever get to see in the first place.”  
“Most of the ones who do don't get to live to think too much about it.” Revenant says. It is idle, a simple statement of fact. He realizes it sounds like a threat, and likes and dislikes it equally.  
The man could very well just disable him with another EMP, if he had one on him. But what would the purpose of that be?   
They both know that is not what he has come here for. 

“Most people are not as well-prepared for every contingency as me,” the hacker says, level and calm, and then he takes the two steps closer to him and looks down at him. 

Closer. Whatever olfactory sensors he has, they are powerful, and he wonders how much more powerful than a human nose, or if they are similar, or weaker, or what. He cannot remember having had an 'original' sense of smell. The thought used to distress him.  
Now, though, now—he will take whatever he can get. 

And what he gets is so MUCH it is nearly overwhelming. The hacker smells warm, and faintly like warmed silicone, and the faint, vaguely ozone smell of warmed carbon-fiber from his implants, and more strongly like cheap soap—why does Revenant know there is a difference? It was important, once. Once, knowing the difference between cheap and expensive had been part of his job, part of some of the many covers. Now, like much of his recovered memory, it is just so much useless mental flotsam.   
.   
He can FEEL the electricity under the man's skin, a warm, buzzing current, and hear the way his heart is clenching in his chest, a little fist of muscle pumping the vital fuel through his body. He is reasonably certain that humans cannot feel each others' electrical currents.   
He is strangely glad, then, that he—or perhaps his body—is not human. He savors this, jealously, secretively, hoarding the sensations like treasure.   
The hacker reaches out with one hand, a sterile wipe held in the other, and waits.

Revenant looks between the outstretched hand and his face, and tries to think. He tries to remember if he has ever done this with anyone else. How long ago it was.   
If it was real. If any of it was ever real.   
He wonders if it matters. Right now he is sitting in a room barely bigger than a closet, on a folded blanket on a crate. He could be out of the room in seconds, down the side of the building in minutes. It would not even be difficult.   
He tells himself the reason he stays is because the hacker is useful. He must have some vital information about the Syndicate, possibly a way to get him more information about Hammond and their higher-ups. Already he has given him some information that he has been working with. Revenant has caught some of the people and dealt with them, but they are unimportant, mere rungs on the ladder he is climbing.   
He leans forward. The pads of the hacker's fingertips yield slightly under the pressure from his jaw, deliciously forbidden and soft.   
He makes a rough, mechanical noise, but quietly.


	4. Chapter 4

Tae Joon remembered feeding street cats, when he was a street kid. How they'd hiss and spit, at first, until you made it clear you weren't a threat.  
Some of them would never let you come close, no matter how much food you brought, or how quiet you were.  
But some of them, if you were patient, could be gentled. They would sit and let him rub their fur, or their bony backs, and they would trot towards him with the tips of their tails curled.  
They did not know how to meow, but their bright eyes would follow him. 

Revenant's eyes never left his face, tracking all his movements.   
Tae Joon kept his movements slow and quiet, telegraphed every action before he did it. 

“You have some damage here,” he said, his fingertips gentle on the edge of the fiber-alloy jaw, beneath one high 'cheekbone'. The red ferroceramic coating was scraped down to the silvery metal beneath, in a single long swoop, down from the cheekbone towards the 'mouth'.   
“How did anything get close enough to you to do this in the first place?”  
The yellow lens-irises dilated to sharp, dangerous points, and a lesser man would have flinched away from what was certainly the last thing many people had seen before being eviscerated.  
Tae Joon did not so much as blink.

When the silence stretched on longer, he simply exhaled quietly, and started to pull away.  
Revenant's hand was around his wrist a moment later, the pressure barely there. He had to know exactly how hard to calibrate it; as it was, he could have simply pulled his hand free, or jerked it away.   
After another long moment, Revenant said, hesitatingly, “I did it to myself.”  
“To yourself? But why?”  
Revenant's eyes flickered over his face, his own immobile platinum-white face wholly impassive. But he was tense, leaning forward towards Tae Joon. As if a secret was straining its way out.  
Tae Joon waited.  
In a moment his patience was rewarded.  
“People believe a lot of lies. Human society is a system of lies and illusions. Sometimes you see through them at...inopportune moments.”

Tae Joon raised his eyebrows and inclined his head, silently urging him to continue. 

Revenant rumbled, “I was shaving.” then, even lower, “They made me THINK I was shaving.”  
It took Tae Joon a minute, and a glance down at his other hand, still resting on his other knee, at the old-fashioned Hammond Robotics insignia on the back of his hand, before it clicked.   
He'd heard horror stories about the experiments they'd been doing—everything from neural scans uploaded without the original person's consent, to stolen brain tissue being integrated into simulacrum bodies. Hammond had always had Enough money to throw at complainers to silence them—and many of the reporters who had broken important information had had strange 'accidents', which only resulted in half-cocked police investigations that went nowhere. This did nothing to quell the rumors. 

It had not occurred to him that Revenant could once have been human.  
But this made a kind of grim, depressing sense. 

Tae Joon said, quietly, “They made you hurt yourself.”  
Revenant made a choked huff of sound. “That's the least of what they made me DO, to myself or anyone else.” Then, after a moment, “Are you going to keep staring at it, or are you going to finish?”  
“I'm sorry,” Tae Joon said, “Here, let me.”

He wiped him down carefully, then took one of his big hands in his own and cleaned that, too, going over all the small detailed areas with a fine, soft brush after wiping it down. Revenant removed his scarf one-handed and bent his head lower, giving him access to the back of his head, where there were six more occipital ports. He recognized two of them. Tiny bits of debris and dirt pattered softly down onto the towel around the simulacrum as he worked. 

Tae Joon started talking quietly, telling him bits of not-intel about the Hammond Group, their CEO, the simulacrum program. All of this is such old news that he remembered reading some of it in history books, but Revenant listened patiently. He had no idea how old Revenant was; maybe, to him, this WAS new. Maybe he'd been locked up in some storage facility this whole time, and had broken out, and was still confused and disoriented.

He kept his voice quiet and his hands gentle, as he worked.   
He wondered who he'd been, and how long ago it was that his humanity had been ripped away from him and replaced with metal and smoke and ash.


End file.
